TEPCO 'finds crack' in Fukushima’s water tank after huge sea leak

This handout picture taken by Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) on September 26, 2013 shows a silt fence (yellow floats), a device to trap sediment before water flows into the sea, which has broken at the port of TEPCO's Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant at Okuma town in Fukushima prefecture. (AFP Photo) / AFP

Workers from Japan’s TEPCO Fukushima Daiichi plant have located a crack in the bottom of a tank that may have leaked 300 tons of radioactive water in August, Japanese media reports. This comes as the company seeks to reopen another nuclear plant.

The water that was being pumped into the tank at the Fukushima
Daiichi nuclear plant could have caused the existing gap to
expand and likely led to the massive leak, TV channel NHK
reported. The leak which sparked the crisis came from one of the
1,000 above-ground storage tanks built inside the plant by Tokyo
Electric Power Company (TEPCO). The company promised to continue
their investigations.

Moreover, silt fences intended to prevent soil containing
radioactive substances from slipping into the ocean were found to
be damaged on Thursday. The damage was found close to the
buildings of the fifth and sixth units, NHK reported. Both were
on cold shutdown for planned maintenance, thereby managing to
avoid meltdowns.

A TEPCO spokesman said that the area was not a danger zone.
“Radiation levels in this area's seawater are very low, and no
contaminated water tanks are placed near reactors 5 and 6,”
he told AFP.

The fence is also designed to prevent radioactive material
emerging from damaged units 1, 2, 3 and 4, where another separate
fence is set up. It was damaged in April by rough waves and bad
weather.

All of Japan’s 50 nuclear reactors were shut down following the
2011 earthquake and tsunami which wreaked havoc at Fukushima and
sparked a nuclear crisis in which meltdowns occurred in three
reactors. It was considered to be the world’s worst nuclear
accident since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.

Following the devastation, the public outcry over the persistent
usage of nuclear power in Japan has prompted protests, drawing
thousands in some cases.

Some rallies have drawn links and comparisons to the nuclear
bombs at Hisoshima and Nagasaki, dropped by the US on Japan in
1945, at the end of World War II. These have been dismissed by
officials as distasteful, and perhaps even histrionic.

“Our position, and this is a position we can never compromise
on, is that nuclear weapons are an absolute evil,” Hiroshima
Mayor Kazumi Matsui said in an impassioned interview with AP at
City Hall. “I oppose connecting the two, simply because they
both involve radiation.”

The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs killed some 140,000 people, and
while nobody has yet been known to die from exposure to the
Fukushima radiation, the disaster, which involved a massive
earthquake and tsunami, caused the deaths of nearly 20,000
people.

Additionally, the long-term health toll is yet to be seen. The
Japanese government has already detected 44 confirmed and
suspected cases of thyroid cancer among 217,000 children (aged 18
and under) who have been checked in Fukushima.

Despite the protests and opposition, there are still plans in
place to restart plants.

On Thursday, TEPCO received approval to restart the Kashiwazaki
Kariwa plant in the western Niigata prefecture, which has been
central to the company’s turnaround plans following the Fukushima
disaster in 2011.

The governor of the prefecture said that he was allowing the
utility to apply for safety approval, despite previous statements
declaring that TEPCO was not fit to run a nuclear plant.
“The Kashiwazaki Kariwa nuclear power plant may be halted but it
is a living facility, and safety must be ensured at the
plant,” Governor Hirohiko Izumida said in a statement faxed
to Reuters. It was released a day after a well-publicized appeal
from the president of TEPCO.

However, the final judgment on whether getting the plant will be
back up and running again is still being withheld.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe returned to power last year, and is a
firm proponent of nuclear power. It is thought that under his
watch, idled reactors may be restarted again. However, TEPCO
itself is behind schedule with its own plans, and since the
disaster has had to deal with the knowledge that radioactive
water has been leaking into the Pacific Ocean ever since the
accident.

Abe has told TEPCO to outline a timeframe for handling the leaks.
TEPCO is currently preparing to test a new filtration system,
beginning Friday. The company’s plans to install more efficient
cleaners have been challenged by the NHK channel.

While the company would like to increase capacity for cleaning
from 500 tons of water per day to 1,500 tons per day, the system
is apparently not capable of removing radioactive tritium from
contaminated water.